“Does the United States exist anymore?”
His eyes narrowed slightly, as if sizing me up.
“That’s an honest question,” I added. “I only know about the Midlands Cluster. I guess there were things happening all over but I haven’t heard anything definite…”
“Neither have the rest of us. Maybe we weren’t supposed to know.”
I couldn’t tell if he believed that sentiment or if he was just trying to probe a little deeper into what I believed. “Gloria was doing what she thought was right,” I said.
“Aren’t we all.”
I held up the scissors. “You really want to sass me while I’m holding these?”
“Hey, I got no opinion on this. I’m just doing my job, feeding the people and sometimes training the fake soldiers.”
I cut a length of gauze. “Fake soldiers? Is that a thing now?”
“We were training up a militia for a while. Durkee asked anyone with some gunning experience to step up and sign on, so my buddy and I did.” He paused. “But Keller didn’t like it, so now I’m on grub duty. Not as much fun.”
I lowered my voice. “Can we get something besides pastrami?”
“Not really.”
Hmph.
So Keller didn’t like militia. I could sort of see why not; he seemed like the kind of guy who needed to control every little thing, and citizen soldiers—or citizen zombie hunters, or whatever the militia was—could quickly spiral out of his grasp. Hammond had allowed the small Elderwood militia to do its own thing for the most part, provided Tony and Corporal Poltava, its leaders, didn’t ask them to do anything too insane. Keller would never permit it. No wonder he’d treated Tony with what seemed like near contempt for his so-called rank.
I paused in my work. “So what did you do before you were feeding the hungry, Mr…?”
“Logan. Specialist Logan Andrews.” He shot me what I suspected was his best smile.
I went back to my repairs. “And what did you specialize in?”
“Sniping.”
I stopped working on him. “You’re a sniper?”
“I am.”
“What the hell are you doing on a food truck? You should be out sniping the undead!”
Logan Andrews shrugged. “Honey, I’ve been asking myself that same question. I just follow orders.”
I supposed there was every possibility that this guy was not exactly the world’s best sniper. Still, Hammond had called up anyone who could hold a gun semi-properly and sent them on patrols and along the guard towers of Camp Elderwood. It had just seemed sensible. Why yank Logan off zombie detail entirely just because the militia wasn’t around?
More and more about Keller just didn’t entirely jive with me, but maybe that’s why I wasn’t running refugee camps.
“So, Logan Andrews, how often does…this…” I gestured to the tent full of injured soldiers, “…happen?”
His smile faded. “We’ve had security breaches right along, but lately they’ve been happening more and more often, and the city’s too damn big. We can’t patrol every fence we put up.” He watched me drip antibiotics into the wound. “Is that actually going to help?”
“You’re not going to turn into a revenant,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I considered the wound—still fresh, still easily treated. “Ninety-nine percent sure.”
“Because I have a bet going with my buddy. If I turn into a zombie, he gets the last of my stash. If I don’t, I get the last of his.”
I started stitching up the deeper portion of it, half-wondering if his buddy was Pete. One, two, three, four… “So your weed habit is hinging on this.”
“Pretty much. I don’t have much left and I doubt anyone’s gonna be growing it anytime soon.” He peered up at me again, those big eyes pleading. “Am I gonna be cured?”
“Haven’t lost one yet,” I said, though that was a lie. Sometimes you just got to patients too late.
Not this one.
“But does this—” he gestured to the bandage, “—actually work?”
I shrugged. “At Elderwood, my supervising physician had us cut out the majority of the infection and use antibiotics to kill the rest. It usually worked.”
He latched onto that word. “Usually?”
“Usually.” I made the final stitch and decided I’d done a pretty decent job. Mom would be proud that I’d finally gotten the hang of sewing, even if I was stitching up skin and not throw pillows. “All right, I’m going to bandage this thing up and give you an oral dose of antibiotics. How many people are in Hastings?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you going to feed this to Gloria Fey? I’ll get in trouble.”
“Gloria Fey is in solitary confinement somewhere. I’m just curious.”
“Solitary…man, Keller wasn’t shitting us, was he?” Logan flinched when I began wrapping his arm, but he plowed on ahead, his tone almost determinedly cheerful. “There were a hundred thousand people living here when shit went down. Figure on thirty thousand dead from reactions, shit in the air, attacks, and everything else, and another ten thousand just missing…”
“Missing?”
“You know. Went to find relatives, thought they’d be heroes, or just went nuts and ran out of town. It happens.” He shrugged. “Still a shitload of people to protect.”
And I’d thought we had it tough in Elderwood. Hastings was the big city in the area, the cosmopolitan center of the Midlands Cluster. Hammond’s forces had been spread too thin just looking after a few thousand. Keller’s boys must have been going crazy trying to keep tabs on everyone.
“That still leaves a lot of people here,” I mused. “I traveled up through Elderwood and Muldoon to get here. It was empty, except for…”
“Zombies?”
I nodded. “I guess I thought Hastings might be like that. Or the rest of the world. I didn’t realize so many people were still alive. After everything, you get used to thinking maybe everyone’s gone. I have a bedroom for the first time in what seems like forever and it’s just…weird.”
He didn’t seem to know quite what to say to that. Hell, I didn’t know why I’d said it. I had learned early on as an EMT that you’re supposed to display good cheer with patients—or at least not let on how bad a particular situation is. That work requirement had carried on after the endtimes, when people came in fearing not just for their lives, but the fate of the entire world. I had been pretty good at maintaining that discipline with those I worked on—or had been, up to this point.
“Rough day, huh?” Logan asked.
“Shittastic,” I said. “And you’re only my first patient.”
He blinked. “Damn, girl. I’d have brought you a vodka or something if I’d known that.”
At this point in time, drinking on the job didn’t seem like an entirely bad idea.
He started pulling his jacket back on. “I haven’t been outside the city. Is it bad?”
I nodded. “It’s all warlords on motorcycles now. Or dead people. Soon enough it’ll be dead warlords.”
“Dead Warlords sounds like a metal band.”
I actually laughed. “Yeah, it does.” I almost told him I used to write for Rock Weekly and probably would have covered the infamous Dead Warlords, but something stopped me. Some desire not to play too much of my hand—not to reveal myself too much to someone I had just met, someone who might be dead by the end of the day through one misfortune or another. “Were you here when it all went down?” I asked.
His shook his head. “No. The Army didn’t move in on the Cluster until after the fact. As far as I know a few small rocks hit around the edges, everything came through pretty much unscathed.”
“I was stuck in an office building in Astra.”
This is what we call post-apocalyptic bonding.
He let out a low whistle. “I heard shit got downright crazy there.”
Crazy was one word for it. “I mean, it kinda burned down.”
La
ttimore thrust her hand into the triage area, interrupting the conversation as well as any warm thoughts I had about the man I was patching up. “Vibeke, how are you with sick people?”
“Sick?” I asked. “Like…puking?”
“I give her two thumbs up,” Logan said. “Or I would. Can I use my arm?”
“Try not to strain yourself too much.”
He flashed me a grin that I’m sure broke plenty of hearts in his day. “I gotta get my sister in to see you,” he said. “She’s not feeling great.”
Lattimore cleared her throat. “If you’re quite done flirting, I need you triaging. More are coming in.”
Saying no, I don’t want to deal with sick people probably wouldn’t go over all that well, so I patted Logan on the shoulder. “Nice meeting you, Specialist,” I said. Then I turned to Lattimore. “I’m all set.”
Triage sucked even when the world still worked.
It made someone like me—someone you wouldn’t really want in charge of anything—decide who lived and who died, who needed treatment and who was probably beyond hope.
It was not a good career match. Hell, I used temporary hair dye before the endtimes because I couldn’t commit to a single color. I made bad choices every day. Who in their right mind would put me in charge of anything, much less a life?
Apparently the end of the world put everyone in unenviable positions.
Lattimore, either terribly overworked or wanting to see me sweat a little, shoved me through another tent partition and left me treading water in a sea of injured and sick people. I gaped around the giant tent, not entirely willing to immerse myself into the swarm. There was no way I could get to all of these people. No fucking way.
“Um,” I said, hoping she’d change her mind and send me to help Dax with the bedpans, “can you…I mean…I don’t even know…”
“I need you to separate out the bites and injuries from people who are sick. Don’t want them trading germs back and forth. Go to it.”
Off she went, presumably to deal with more pressing medical matters.
I liked you a lot better on television. That cool, somewhat dispassionate persona she’d projected on the screen had been great when we first learned about the dead rising, but actually working for her was proving to be something of a challenge.
Besides, from what I’d seen so far, her bedside manner left a bit to be desired.
Maybe bedside manners didn’t matter anymore.
I had learned the triage method on my third day of work, but hadn’t yet been called upon to do it. Now I started at the front of the room with three sets of tags: red, blue, and black. Red was for physical injuries that needed attending; the bites, the scratches, and broken limbs. Blue was for flu, cold, and other illnesses that were probably not directly related to falling off a roof or getting attacked by a hungry beast.
Black was for those we couldn’t help.
Maybe I wouldn’t need to use them.
And maybe the skies will part and the zombies will fly and this will all be some really fucked up dream you had because you did too much LSD with the Blood Nuts. At this point, I probably would have welcomed that scenario.
Alas, I had to tag and bag.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked a young woman with a slightly reddened nose.
“I have a cough,” she said, then coughed to punctuate her statement.
I frowned, leaning closer to her chest. It rattled slightly when she breathed in. Fluid in the lungs. Shit. I slapped a blue tag on her wrist and wrote down her symptoms on the chart tied to her bed. Lattimore hadn’t told me to do that, but I figured it couldn’t hurt whoever wound up attending to her. “How long have you been feeling bad?”
“I wasn’t feeling great this week, but I didn’t start feeling bad until a couple days ago.”
“Take any medications? Did you stop any recently?”
“No. My boyfriend gave me some cold medication last night, but it didn’t seem to work.”
Pneumonia, maybe? Recalling my earlier gaffe with Logan, I gave her what I felt was a reasonably reassuring smile. “A couple rounds of antibiotics and you’ll be fine. Take it easy, okay?”
“Thanks.”
I moved on to the next patient. He was so doped up he couldn’t speak, but the splinted wrist and missing fingers were enough of a description. “Sorry, man,” I said, putting a red tag on him. “I hope you can’t feel anything.”
He gazed up at something on the ceiling.
Down the lines of cots I went, tagging people left and right. I fell into a rhythm after a while, slapping on the tags and managing to coldly assess every injury, as opposed to chatting people up and figuring out what was bothering them. I considered their injuries, their breathing, and made the assessments that I could. My time with Samuels in Elderwood had taught me more than the average EMT would know, but it was no substitution for a real nurse or a doctor, or even a proper combat medic.
I put a black tag around one woman’s ankle. She was barely breathing, and her eyes had sunken deep into her sockets. I couldn’t find any evidence of bite marks on her, though she had festering sores along her arms and legs. Skin condition of some kind, I thought. Maybe some sort of cancer gone wrong, or a reaction to the acid rain that occasionally dribbled out of the sky.
We’d need to get her out of here pronto in case she reanimated. A zombie slaughter in triage would be too much for one day.
“Hey! Medic!”
I turned around.
Two soldiers carted in a mass of scarlet and slime. I retched on the spot. I couldn’t believe the thing on the stretcher had once been a person, much less might still be alive.
Holy shit, where do I start?
His insides were outside. His skin…I don’t know what happened to his skin. I was pretty sure we didn’t have enough blood in the camp to stabilize him. There probably wasn’t enough blood left in the entire Midlands Cluster.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Medic, give him something, give him something…”
Where the hell was I even supposed to jam in the lidocaine? This is way above my pay grade!
“Doctor!” I called out. I found a patch of skin still attached to him and inserted the needle, depressing it as fast as I dared. “What happened to him?”
“Don’t know,” one of the soldiers said. “He was checking out a spot and he screamed and we heard this…sound…”
Iron-hard digits clamped down around my wrist, and the mass on the stretcher surged upward, staring at me with one good eye. “The squad,” he growled out, “the squad!”
I stared into his pupil, unable to pry my gaze away.
“We’re okay, man,” one of his companions said. “We’re okay!”
“Dinosaurs,” he coughed.
His chest heaved, and warm liquid splattered across my face.
The dude expired on the spot.
I stood there, staring at his remains, his blood running down my nose and chin. Holy shit. Holy shit, he had just died right in front of me.
Son of a bitch, how much blood was I going to get splattered on me in Hastings?
“Oh fucking shit,” the second soldier whispered. “I knew he shouldn’t have checked out that pit.
He fell into a pit full of zombies and got devoured. Christ on a pogostick, what a way to go.
“Are there dinosaurs here?” the first soldier squawked. “I can’t fucking take dinosaurs, man!”
I glanced at his partner, who seemed to be handling things in a marginally more mature fashion. “Was…was there a dinosaur?” I asked, if only because at this point in the apocalypse I wasn’t willing to write anything off.
He gaped at me. “What do you think, dumbass?”
Lattimore chose that moment to check in on me. She took in the massive amounts of blood, the dead man and his wounds, and the hyperventilating soldier…and then she saw the blood on my face. “What the fuck happened here?”
I dropped my kit on the table beside him. “Th
ey said he fell into a zombie pit.” I gestured to his buddies. “His last word was dinosaur.”
“Hmm.” She looked down at the dead man, and then gestured to one of his companions. “Well, better that than porridge. Plug him, Corporal. We don’t want him getting up and slopping his insides all over the floor.”
She walked away, once again the poster child for nonplussed endtimes medical care.
I was pretty sure a little bit of my soul evaporated that day.
CHAPTER SIX
Other medical emergencies just don’t seem that exciting after you’ve tried to help an eviscerated man.
I had to wash my hands after the situation with the wounded private. Actually, I had to have Dax take me out back and hose me down in the Designated Bedpan Sanitation Area, which, let me tell you, smelled every bit as good as you think. Lattimore hadn’t even wanted to let me go until she realized even she could not argue with the fact that letting a blood-covered medic handle fragile patients was definitely not hygienic.
“Did you do this all the time in Elderwood?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We once had a triage of six people in Elderwood. That was pretty big. I have never seen something like…this.”
So far, Hastings was proving more of a challenge. The old me might have been excited—viewed it as something to work toward, some way to improve myself and broaden my skills. Even back in Elderwood I’d been pleased that I was at least learning something, making myself useful.
Now…well, now it was just more bullshit.
We’re all going to die in the end anyway.
That was a dangerous way to think, and I knew it.
Dax handed me a new shirt. I pulled it on over my shivering form, then wiped my face and hands on a rough towel that had definitely seen better days. Then I went back inside.
This kept up for a couple of days. It was as close to monotony as we ever got.
“Someone asked for you,” Pete the orderly said some days later, his eyes possessing that familiar level of blank placidness I’d come to associate with him.
“For me?”
“Yeah. Over there.”
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